Hey HN,<p>I made Vox, a static website to listen to articles using OpenAI's text-to-speech API. For an article of about 2000 words, it will set you back about 15-25 cents. It uses IndexedDB to provide a searchable history of all articles you have converted in the past along with the audio and transcript. There's also an option to fetch the article text via archive.ph.<p>You can also install the website as a PWA (on iOS, click the share button > "Add to Home Screen") to your home-screen.<p>The code is open-source: <a href="https://github.com/prasoon2211/vox">https://github.com/prasoon2211/vox</a><p>Word of warning though - I'm not really a web-dev so this was pretty much all developed using Claude and Cursor.<p>I made this because I love listening to podcasts while I go on walks. Problem was, most content I consume is long-form articles. The safari browser on iOS does provides basic TTS but it's just not a good listening experience because of the poor quality of Apple's TTS. This app finally allows me to listen to articles just like podcasts with near-human quality TTS.<p>OpenAI API was the easiest-to-use TTS provider I found though it's probably not the cheapest or best quality. I will be looking into adding cheaper providers. I also tried running TTS models via WASM in the browser but the audio quality is just not good enough!<p>Potential Issues: Vox uses a variety of freely available CORS proxies to get around CORS limitations but a downside of that is that sometimes these proxies refuse to work if there are too many requests from the same IP. If this happens, please feel free to either run the app locally OR deploy the dist folder on netlify. I'm looking to getting around this limitation and open to suggestions.
Would be nice if you used AI to "clean" the article. The reason why I didn't like other readers is because they just access the website in reader mode and transcribe, but they keep all the urls, weird tittle formatting etc which makes the transcription really annoying to listen too. I think a simple prompt like "rewrite this article removing all formatting, just keep the content" should work!